In a recent study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, faculty at the UK's Bristol University "proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks to society," according an Associated Press article published Friday. The study, led by Prof. David Nutt, ranked the various commonly used drugs, and found alcohol and tobacco to be among the top ten most dangerous -- ahead of marijuana and ecstasy, though behind cocaine and heroin.


Nutt and his colleagues feel that Britain's current drug classification, which divides them into three different categories -- ostensibly based on their potential for harm -- is "ill thought-out and arbitrary," he told the AP. "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary."


One might think such talk could fuel calls for alcohol or (more likely) tobacco prohibition -- I hope not! That isn't necessarily what they are looking for -- Nutt wants more education, he said, and realism. "All drugs are dangerous, even the ones people know and love and use every day."

Marijuana's relative lack of harmfulness is one good reason to want to legalize it. Certainly it makes vividly clear the bizarre senselessness of what we are doing here in the US, where police make over 700,000 arrests for marijuana every year, about 2,000 per day.

For other drugs, paradoxically, their harmfulness is one of the best reasons for wanting to legalize them. As my friends at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition are fond of saying (and as their bumper sticker that I have stuck to back of my car exclaims), "drugs are too dangerous to leave in the hands of criminals." Especially for people who are addicted to them -- what a dangerous and tumultuous and destructive situation it must be to be tied to the criminal underground for getting the fix that you're just not ready yet to do without! A lot of people have trouble with that idea; they see the harms and the miserable condition of people who've gotten hooked on these drugs, and they can't imagine that it would be a good idea to legalize them.

An understandable reaction, but an illogical one. All of the harms we see today related to cocaine and heroin and the like are the harms that exist under the current system. At a minimum the current system did not prevent them. The idea that more people would get addicted to the drugs if they were legal is mere speculation, and to me it seems doubtful -- I wouldn't use heroin if it were legal, and only rarely has anyone who doesn't use heroin now told me that he would. In the meanwhile, the addict suffers severe financial debilitation from the high street prices created by prohibition -- often is driven to extreme measures to afford drugs that would cost pennies to produce in a legal market -- and is at risk of overdose from fluctuating purity or poisoning from adulteration. We are literally driving addicts to their deaths, who might survive, eventually maybe even recover, if we would simply allow them to acquire their drugs from a safe and affordable source.

A conversation I had at a social function a few years ago illustrates the confusion. The person I was speaking with had very decent views on the issue -- he was all for legalization of marijuana, he hated mandatory minimum sentencing, he was all for helping people with programs like needle exchange and so forth -- but he couldn't imagine legalizing heroin or cocaine.

An example he provided to me, from his personal experience, was one that illustrates my point about the fallacy of the line of reasoning. He told me about a wedding he had recently attended, at which the groom had gotten wired on cocaine and was acting out from it. It was a very uncomfortable situation for everybody, and the fact that this guy couldn't stay off of the stuff on his wedding day, in front of everybody, really said something negative to him about it. It certainly sounded like a bad scene to me.

But are there any ways it could have turned out worse? One way that it could have turned out worse is that the groom could have gotten a bad batch of the stuff, and instead of making people uncomfortable with his behavior, simply dropped dead. Such a tragic outcome would clearly have been worse than the merely uncomfortable and unpleasant one that transpired, and deaths from that very cause take place thousands of times per year in the US alone.

And that is prohibition at work. If users were getting their substances from licensed manufacturers and outlets who have a strong incentive to secure their reputations and stay on the right side of the law, it would almost never happen -- some people would still overdo it and harm themselves in that way, but only rarely from getting something other than what they thought they were getting.

So again, I find my conversation partner's reaction to the situation he witnessed to be understandable. But it is not well thought out. Just because a drug is dangerous doesn't automatically mean that banning it is a good response, and making such an assumption takes a pretty big leap of logic. The danger of a drug only raises the question of how to best respond to it, but does not answer that question.

The Bristol study is a positive contribution to the debate. Implementation of its recommendations would undoubtedly improve policies, assuming the implementation did not include any new prohibitions. But the harmfulness of a drug is only the beginning of the discussion, not the ending. Ultimately it is the consequences of prohibition -- and they are terrible -- which point to where governments need to go in drug policy. And that is to prohibition's ending.